No business like snow business

and, across a five- year period, almost every major manufacturer of vehicles, tyres and other components will be in residence at some point during the Kiwi winter.

Back to the drifting though; it’s much harder than it looks on snow because each of the five vehicles at our disposal are all wheel- drive ( yes, even the 7- Series).

This means that rather than counter- steer into the drift, you need to steer with the direction of travel and feather the throttle . . . so, sort of opposite of what they appear to do in those Fast &

Furious “documentaries”. As much as I’d love to boast about successfully sliding the luxobarge, I have better success in the drift circle in a lowly BMWX1.

Perhaps it has something to do with the X1’ s compact crossover SUV nature — or its significantly lighter kerb weight — but finally I start to get it; steering into the drift, remaining focused on the next marker rather than the deceptively solid snowbank to my right, easing the power on and off to maintain the right angle.

Once you start to “get it”, it’s surprisingly intoxicating.

Of course, skill is relative. And any skills I fleetingly discover are put to shame compared to those of BMWNewZealand’s head driving instructor, Mike Eady.

He’s in charge of the this- is- how- it’s- done section of our day at the SHPG: driving Alpine xDrive participants around some of the facility’s handling tracks in a rear wheel drive M3 sedan.

The noise the M3 makes sounds especially epic bouncing off all that crisp snow, while Eady rarely has the car poised with its nose looking straight ahead.

The control is impressive; a fellow xDriver’s GoPro footage revealing just how close the car comes to scraping the snow banks.

The only possible finale could be a refreshing beer in front of the outdoor fire at the historic Cardrona Hotel, at the bottom of the Race to the Sky- utilised access road.

Well, we earned it.